Dynaudio, which often exhibits with Simaudio Moon electronics, this time was doing a demo (with Mick Tillman in the photo) of their Contour S 3.4 LE speaker ($7850/pair) in a system featuring the Octave V110 integrated, T+A Elektroakustik music player/CD transport/DAC, and In-Akustik cables.
What a difference a tweeter makes! Elac makes a small bookshelf speaker, the BS 73, which costs $850/pair. They make another, even smaller, bookshelf speaker, the BS 312, which costs $2800/pair. The BS 312 is shown in the center of the photo, with the BS 73 flanking it (I'm not sure which one). There are some obvious differences in construction (the BS 312 has a metal cabinet), but the greatest difference is probably the tweeter: the BS 73 uses a dome tweeter, whereas the BS 312 uses what they call a JET tweeter.
Wei Chang, designer of the $3690 Sopranino electrostatic supertweeter that John Atkinson reviewed last May, was showing their bookshelf-sized, 42 lb monitor loudspeaker, the $14,690/pair Mythology 1, which incorporates the Sopranino for the top-octave driver.
Epos and Creek have long been associatedEpos loudspeakers seemed to work particularly well with Creek electronicsbut the connection became more solidified in 2014, when Mike Creek acquired total control of Epos and appointed his son, Luke, to be the Epos brand director. The first result of this change of ownership is the new Epos K-Series, which importer Roy Hall describes as being more "lifestyle-oriented."
Thanks to Brian Ackerman of Aaudio Imports, Finite Elemente's equipment supports and racks have returned to the US. market. All of the company six different Cera equipment supports models ($230$820/set of 3, depending upon model) uses ceramic bearings, and, save for the aluminum shell of the entry-level Ceraball, stainless steel housings to isolate equipment from vibrations.
Hi-rez pioneer/evangelist/recording engineer Mark Waldrep of AIX Records held forth in the Hi-Res Audio Showroom in the Venetian Hotel, near booths from Super HiRez and HDTracks. AIX Records' 2015 sampler, containing three different mixes of 70 tracks drawn from its rich catalog, is due sometime in February.
Though the basic package is still the same, Furutech says it has completely redesigned the insides of the GT40α which now handles 24/192 PCM. The company claims that they've added some "serious shielding" inside to protect noise from getting into the built-in MM/MC phono preamp. There is also a USB output for recording your discs to computer. MSRP is $529 in the US.
Scot Markwell of Elite AV Distribution proudly displayed Furutech's top-of-the-line Nanoflux power cable ($4395/1.8m, almost 6 feet). The cable's wire is coated with Nanofluid, microscopic gold and silver suspended in squalene oil that fills in tiny gaps between wire crystals to improve performance.
Danish speaker manufacturer Gamut showed its new RS7 speaker at CES. Costing $39,900/pair, the RS7 is basically the smaller RS5 ($31,990/pair) that I favorably reported on in our 2014 RMAF report with an extra woofer mounted above the tweeter to give a full three-way design.
Gary Leonard Koh, the President and CEO of Genesis Advanced Technologies, walked me through the latest technological upgrades he has made available through his product line.
GoldenEar’s Sandy Gross emailed before the show about Golden Ear’s new compact, sealed, self-powered Supersub XXL subwoofer ($1999), which would be premiered at CES 2015. The subwoofer has two inertially-balanced, long-throw 12" woofers in the horizontal plane and two fully inertially-balanced 12.75" by 14.5" passive radiators in the vertical plane.
Meetings were frequently in progress when I glanced at the HDTracks booth in the Hi-Res Audio Workshop ballroom. Every time I take a look at the company's site, it's loaded with new releases from everyone from The Who and Eric Clapton to Anna Netrebko and a host of Grammy 2015 nominees. It was great to see David Chesky again, even though he kept mistaking me for tenor Jonas Kaufmann. I should be so lucky.
Larry Smith (left) and David Salz (right) of Wireworld have every reason to smile. Not only have they entered the headphone cable market with four levels of Nano cables for headphones and portables, and stand prepared to market a Starlight CAT7a media network cable ($TBD) that claims higher transmission speeds for streamed music and video, but they've also come out on top in a recently published cable listening comparison test.
You can use this one just for headphones or hook up a pair of speakers to the 150 wpc amp. In addition to a handful of analog inputs, the H160 accepts SPDIF, USB, optical and ethernet connections for digital audio. But that's not all: Hegel has done some tweaking in software to improve wireless playback from any Apple AirPlay or DLNA device. Available now for $3,500